Happy 5th birthday, Genesis Block

The Bitcoin community still has a few things it needs to work out internally: the role and extent of government cooperation, whether to abbreviate BTC or XBT, and when to celebrate the currency’s birthday.

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The Bitcoin community still has a few things it needs to work out internally: the role and extent of government cooperation, whether to abbreviate BTC or XBT, and when to celebrate the currency’s birthday.

This next paragraph will read a lot like pro-choice argument, but here goes: If you think Bitcoin was born upon the publication of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper, then Bitcoin turned five back on November 1. But if you think the mining of block zero, or The Genesis Block, was the birth of the currency, then we just hit the five-year mark on January 3.

I vote we skip the controversy and just celebrate the Genesis Block’s fifth birthday.

The Genesis Block is the first block of Bitcoin’s block chain. This block wasn’t mined like all subsequent blocks, but it was coded into the software. The 50 Bitcoins that resulted from that block were designed to be unusable so that only publically mined coins could be used.

Others around the world celebrated on January 3. In Hawai’i for example, Bitcoin Hawaii LLC hosted The Blockchain Bash party in cooperation with coworking space The Box Jelly.

Or, we could be sentimental in our celebrations and take a look back on the year that was, Year 5 on the Genesis Block calendar. And if you want to go even further back, check out this new site, HistoryOfBitcoin.org, which features a timeline of major events since Bitcoin’s launch.